Search found 22 matches

by bmcveigh
Mon May 20, 2024 6:14 pm
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: Exteriorized and Interiorized Hallucinability: Their Relation to Bicameral and Postbicameral Mentalities
Replies: 0
Views: 5651

Exteriorized and Interiorized Hallucinability: Their Relation to Bicameral and Postbicameral Mentalities

Evolution has scaffolded more sophisticated mentation (conceptual processes) on top of more primitive mentation (perceptual processes). This has occurred over millions of years. For humans, probably sometime in the late paleolithic (40,000 to 10,000 BCE), what can be called “superceptual processes,”...
by bmcveigh
Sun Apr 14, 2024 4:28 pm
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: Applying the Appropriate Intellectual Tools to Analyze Consciousness
Replies: 0
Views: 6008

Applying the Appropriate Intellectual Tools to Analyze Consciousness

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” Abraham Maslow Building a house requires tools and building materials. Put hammers, saws, and levels together with lumber, concrete, and nails, and we have a habitable edifice. Materials do not, obviously, spontaneously build themselves in...
by bmcveigh
Fri Apr 05, 2024 4:53 pm
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: How Psyche Scaled Up over Time: Our Mental Architecture Undergirds Kinship and Political Systems
Replies: 1
Views: 5418

How Psyche Scaled Up over Time: Our Mental Architecture Undergirds Kinship and Political Systems

How Psyche Scaled Up over Time: Our Mental Architecture Undergirds Kinship and Political Systems How the family has related to nonfamilial social spheres of existence involves what ways human history has unfolded on a grand scale down through the millennia. In the prehistorical period, encountering ...
by bmcveigh
Tue Apr 02, 2024 12:50 pm
Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Olfactory hallucinations
Replies: 2
Views: 4407

Re: Olfactory hallucinations

Quite interesting. In my book on ancient Egypt, I point out how apparently people could "smell" the gods; presumably this was a type of hallucination. I think I mentioned to this group that twice, out of the blue, I hallucinated the smell of saguaro cacti (I lived in the southwest for 10 y...
by bmcveigh
Mon Mar 25, 2024 8:34 am
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: Humans Are Endowed with Hallucinability: “Hearing Voices” Is not Inherently Psychopathological
Replies: 0
Views: 12317

Humans Are Endowed with Hallucinability: “Hearing Voices” Is not Inherently Psychopathological

I propose two diametrically-opposed perspectives on the nature of hallucinations. The first is the mainstream view held by most psychiatrists, mental health care providers, and researchers: Hallucinations signal brain disease or neurological dysfunction of some sort and are themselves pathological. ...
by bmcveigh
Tue Mar 19, 2024 11:24 am
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: Sensed Presences as “Perceptionless Hallucinations”: The Invisible Company of “Supernatural Beings” in the Ancient World
Replies: 0
Views: 9233

Sensed Presences as “Perceptionless Hallucinations”: The Invisible Company of “Supernatural Beings” in the Ancient World

Sensed Presences as “Perceptionless Hallucinations”: The Invisible Company of “Supernatural Beings” in the Ancient World May Be Overlooked At the margins of mainstream psychology stand a family of anomalous experiences, e.g., spirit possession, hypnosis, prophetic frenzy, imaginary playmates, out-of...
by bmcveigh
Thu Mar 07, 2024 9:43 am
Forum: 2.4. Hypothesis Two: The Bicameral Mind | Subtopic: Religion & the Bicameral Mind
Topic: Voodoo and the Bicameral Mind
Replies: 1
Views: 7754

Re: Voodoo and the Bicameral Mind

Jaynes devoted a chapter to spirit possession, something widely practiced in Haiti. So he would appreciate the connection to Vodou. Yes, indeed, you're right that to understand Jaynes, we have to "invoke thousands-of-years-old history to explain it, including ancient religious beliefs that have...
by bmcveigh
Fri Mar 01, 2024 4:04 pm
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: What Discipline Best Describes Jaynes's Approach?
Replies: 0
Views: 9161

What Discipline Best Describes Jaynes's Approach?

I was wondering if group members would share their opinions about how best to describe the Jaynesian agenda. One of the biggest challenges many face when trying to intellectually digest Jaynes is coming to terms with his decidedly interdisciplinary approach. He integrated very different bodies of kn...
by bmcveigh
Fri Feb 02, 2024 4:59 pm
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: North Korea’s “Eternal Leader” as a Bicameral Vestige: The Psychopolitical Implications of Rule by the Dead
Replies: 0
Views: 8452

North Korea’s “Eternal Leader” as a Bicameral Vestige: The Psychopolitical Implications of Rule by the Dead

Signs of early humankind’s great preoccupationobsession?with death are everywhere, from simple neolithic graves filled with a few artifacts to monumental mortuary architecture and everything else in between: massive megalithic tombs and passage graves, catacombs honeycombing the underground for mi...
by bmcveigh
Sun Jan 28, 2024 5:12 am
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: Consciousness Is the Holy Grail of Neuroscience: Why We Still Misunderstand a Crucial Concept in Psychology
Replies: 0
Views: 8780

Consciousness Is the Holy Grail of Neuroscience: Why We Still Misunderstand a Crucial Concept in Psychology

The word “consciousness” imparts a mystique that makes otherwise cautious and careful researchers jump to unwarranted conclusions. For many consciousness is a topic of mystery and fascination. Given its promiscuous mention in academic and nonacademic writings, consciousness, for not a few, is like t...
by bmcveigh
Thu Jan 25, 2024 5:35 pm
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: The Spiritual Impulse Is Primordial and Historically Omnipresent: The Prototheism Hypothesis
Replies: 0
Views: 8151

The Spiritual Impulse Is Primordial and Historically Omnipresent: The Prototheism Hypothesis

Let us start with a simple and straightforward claim: All human societies exhibit or have exhibited religiosity. This is a fact so solid, so obvious, that it usually remains unchallenged. We are so familiar with the historical landscape of religion that we do not question the utter strangeness of th...
by bmcveigh
Sat Dec 30, 2023 3:48 pm
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: Historical Patterns in World Religions: A Jaynesian Perspective
Replies: 0
Views: 8700

Historical Patterns in World Religions: A Jaynesian Perspective

A prevailing premise is that the origin of religion is a mystery in desperate need of explanation. Humans, after all, are inherently rational and logical, so why would they engage in something so irrational, illogical, and superstitious as religion? But it is the emergence of Enlightenment science a...
by bmcveigh
Mon Dec 18, 2023 5:48 pm
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: The Birth of Christianity from a Jaynesian Perspective: Faith as Consciously-interiorized Belief
Replies: 1
Views: 8038

The Birth of Christianity from a Jaynesian Perspective: Faith as Consciously-interiorized Belief

By the early 300s CE perhaps only 5% of the Roman Empire’s population was Christian. But Constantine’s “conversion” in 312 CE initiated a gradual spiritual transformation of the Empire. In 380 CE the Edict of Thessalonica proclaimed Nicene Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, grantin...
by bmcveigh
Sun Nov 05, 2023 5:03 pm
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: How Could Different Individuals Hear the Same Hallucination in Preconscious Civilizations? Hierarchies of Hallucinations
Replies: 0
Views: 8996

How Could Different Individuals Hear the Same Hallucination in Preconscious Civilizations? Hierarchies of Hallucinations

Some question Jaynesian psychology by asking “how could everyone hear the same hallucinated voices or see the same visions?” Several responses resolve this problem. First, most of the time individuals would not hear hallucinations; they only hallucinated when facing novel or relatively stress-induci...
by bmcveigh
Thu Oct 19, 2023 5:46 pm
Forum: Brian J. McVeigh's Random Thoughts
Topic: Jaynesian Psychology: Theories in Search of a Paradigm Shift
Replies: 1
Views: 8836

Jaynesian Psychology: Theories in Search of a Paradigm Shift

Jaynesian Psychology: Theories in Search of a Paradigm Shift Science must guard against preconceptions, since seemingly objective research results and conclusions can be subtlety influenced by personal biases and the subjective worldview of individual researchers. But in his immensely influential Th...

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